Senior Backend Engineer, Core Trading Systems
$200k – $260k • meaningful equity
About MAG
MAG is the market-making and proprietary trading arm of Novig. We provide liquidity across sportsrelated event-contract and prediction-market venues and run a proprietary book alongside the mandate. We operate lean by design. A small, senior team with direct exposure to trading, capital, and counterparty work, supported by Novig's broader platform.
With Novig recently becoming a CFTC-designated market — the fastest designation of its kind in US history— we're bringing the prediction market built for sports fans nationwide.
We're backed by some of Silicon Valley's top investors — Pantera, Forerunner, Lux, NFX, Paul Graham, and Joe Montana — who have collectively invested over $100M behind this vision."
About the Role
As a Senior Backend Engineer at MAG, you’ll build the core trading engine that powers our market-making and proprietary trading across multiple prediction-market and event-contract venues. You’ll own the infrastructure that connects to each venue, normalizes real-time market data, manages orders and positions, and enforces risk controls, all with the reliability that live sports demand. You’ll work directly with our traders, turning their feedback into faster execution, better tooling, and new strategy capabilities, with results you’ll see in PnL within days. Because our markets run on the sports calendar, you’ll share on-call duty and cover one weekend roughly every six weeks. This is a high-ownership role on a small team where your architectural decisions will shape how the entire trading operation scales.
Who you are and why this role will excite you
Excited to architect and build Novig’s core trading systems, including the matching engine, market-data pipelines, risk controls, and real-time state machines, shaping the platform at a foundational level
Design and implement deterministic, event-driven systems for matching, settlement, and market-making flows, with strong ordering and idempotency guarantees
Build high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure for data ingestion, distribution, replay, order gateways, session management, and pre-/at-trade risk checks
Develop developer-first APIs for algorithmic trading integrations and high-reliability endpoints for programmatic and UI clients
Collaborate closely with frontend, trading, product, and SRE teams to maintain a seamless, reliable user experience, including recovery, failover, observability, and performance optimization
Expand product surface via modular backend services, contribute to architecture discussions, operational readiness, and production debugging
Optimize system hot paths using profiling, tracing, and performance tools; improve architecture for modularity, stability, and future regulatory compliance
Bring 4+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally in distributed or real-time systems, with proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++ and knowledge of concurrent programming, event-driven architectures, and relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred)
Understand CAP tradeoffs, ordering semantics, and consistency/availability considerations; navigate ambiguity and take ownership across large technical surfaces
Communicate clearly, solve complex problems, and collaborate effectively across teams
Bonus:
Experience with matching engines, market-making systems, order books, HFT infrastructure, Kafka, Redis, real-time streaming systems, or financial exchanges
Passion for sports, betting, and market microstructure, with curiosity about building highly reliable trading systems
Why work here, in the words of the people who do
“I work with extremely stellar people, I own real systems, and decisions happen fast. No politics, no waiting for needless red tape. If something's broken, I fix it. If I build something good, it ships.”
“The people! So smart, thoughtful, fun to work with, passionate about their craft, etc”
“I'm having the most fun I've had in my entire career.”
If you want responsibility, trust, and the chance to help build the future of sports prediction markets - take your shot, we’d love to connect.
Not for everyone
Our work is tied to live sports - that means potential nights, weekends, and pressure included.
If you need clear swim lanes, a heavy process, or someone to tell you what to do, this won’t be the right environment.
Compensation & benefits
$200k – $260k base, benchmarked at top-tier tech companies
Meaningful equity for every employee, regardless of role
100% health premiums covered
99% dental & vision covered
401(k) with 4% company match
HSA + $1,080 annual company contribution
$27/day lunch stipend when working from our NYC office
$35/day dinner stipend when working from the NYC office after 6:30pm
Homebase
Union Square, NYC